Comment by m4rtink

Well, those confused people mainly ignored the flight profile - Apollo spent a very little time in Earth orbit & boosted for Moon. As a result they flew through Van Allen belts very quickly, so the radio was not an issue.

If for example you built a space ship on low Earth with efficient but low thrust ion drive & wanted to take it to Moon or Mars, it would take it possibly months to slowly (but efficiently) spiral out to higher orbit and eventually towards its destination. Many of those months would be spent inside the Van Allen belts.

So for these mission profiles I have seen the suggestion of the ship being radiation hardened for autonomous flight & the crew arriving by a small fast craft only once it is out of the radiation belts.